Charles Taylor and the Intelligence Community's Game

The Boston Globe has some great work this morning by Bryan Bender on the strange history of Charles Taylor, the barbaric former president of Liberia whose war-crimes trial concluded last March at The Hague. Taylor was an authentic monster, but, to paraphrase Randy Newman, he was our monster. We created him. We sustained him. We turned a blind eye to his depredations. And the Play-Doh realpolitik of the geniuses in our intelligence community left the world another bloody mess to clean up now that Taylor's alleged usefulness is done.

The most fascinating thing about Taylor was that he was first busted and incarcerated here in the Commonwealth (God save it!), while on the lam from an embezzlement rap back home. He got tossed into the venerable Plymouth House of Correction, current home of celebrity murderer James (Whitey) Bulger. In 1985, Taylor became the first inmate to escape from Plymouth in a century. More than a few people involved in the case think he had help. Taylor himself testified at his trial that he was pretty much allowed to walk free; the other four saps who went with him were rounded up and stashed back in the hoosegow almost immediately:

"Why would someone walk out of a prison that's never been breached in a 100 years?'" said David M. Crane, who was the chief prosecutor for the Sierra Leone war crimes court from 2002 to 2005 and now teaches at Syracuse University College of Law. "It begs the question: How do you walk out of a prison? It seems someone looked the other way.'"

Perhaps even more striking is the fact that the U.S. intelligence community may have been in the business of orchestrating jailbreaks on American soil, which resulted in untold savagery far away, and nobody seems to think it remarkable in the least.

Charles P. PierceCharles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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